France (Piranha)
Domestic Rights Sales: German Audiobook (Audiobuch); German Entire Radio Reading (NDR)
Renowned Dante scholars from all around the world meet in the ancient hall of Maltese at the Roman Aventine, within view of the St. Peter‘s Basilica. The center of interest is Dante’s Divine Comedy. One of the zealous debaters is Gottlieb Elsheimer, a Romance philologist from Frankfurt and, in his own opinion, a candidate for purgatory rather than for paradise. Despite his passion for the subject of research, the increasingly boisterous behavior of his colleagues seems stranger and...
Renowned Dante scholars from all around the world meet in the ancient hall of Maltese at the Roman Aventine, within view of the St. Peter‘s Basilica. The center of interest is Dante’s Divine Comedy. One of the zealous debaters is Gottlieb Elsheimer, a Romance philologist from Frankfurt and, in his own opinion, a candidate for purgatory rather than for paradise. Despite his passion for the subject of research, the increasingly boisterous behavior of his colleagues seems stranger and stranger. While the church bells ring for Pentecost, an inconceivable event is looming in the distance.
Sibylle Lewitscharoff is a literary heavyweight. Winner of the Büchner-Prize in 2013 and best-selling author, she has put forth another novel and accompanies us through heaven and hell. The most vital aspects of her new novel are the greatest Comedy in world literature, the souls of 34 Dante scholars and a touching narrator, who strives for realism so diligently that he is faced with a true internal conflict about uttering words like »miracle«.
Things aren’t great with our flighty hero. Not even the clear night sky can entice him from his bed. The disappointment about the humiliation his »so-called friend« inflicted on him is too great.
Gloomy weeks skulk by until the phone rings one morning and a not entirely unlikable lady whom Pong has just met voices interest in the empty flat in his house. The background check comes...
Sibylle Lewitscharoff’s narrator is looking down onto his own grave, the bereaved friends and neighbours, onto the strange and the familiar in the city that is moaning under the oppressive heat...
Arabic world rights (Fawasel)
A highly dramatic scene: a father leans over the defenceless boy, the knife flashing in his hand – when, at the last moment, an angel orders him to sacrifice a ram instead of his own son. The...
Russia (Medina)
France (Piranha), Italy (Del Vecchio)
Domestic Rights Sales: German Audiobook (Random House Audio)
English world rights (Seagull), Spanish world rights (Adriana Hidalgo), Chinese simplex rights (Shanghai Translation Publishing House), France (Les Belles Lettres), Italy (Del Vecchio Editore), Bulgaria (Atlantis), Slovenia (Sodobnost)
English world rights (Seagull), Spanish world rights (Hidalgo), Chinese simplex rights (Beijing Qingyan), Chinese complex rights (China Times Publishing), France (Piranha), Italy (Del Vecchio Editore), Hungary (Bookart), Bulgaria (Atlantis), Republic of Moldova / Romanian Rights (Cartier), Estonia (Atlex), Serbia (Presing Izdavastvo), Macedonia (Ars Lamina)
Domestic Rights Sales: German Book Club (Bertelsmann), German Audiobook (Der Hörverlag)